Commentary: Modernisms and Postmodernisms

"China and the world." It's an ancient topic. Ancient and ever changing. Consequently, old and yet new.1 It expresses, variably, emulation, competition, communication, and misunderstanding. Historically, the gravitational pull has reversed from time to time.

"Modern China and the world" puts a spin on the phrase. On the evidence of the articles in this issue of Comparative Literature Studies, "modern" has been a problem term in China for over a century. Indeed, terms for newness itself were coined and fluctuating throughout much of the twentieth century.2 "Modern China and the world" is evidently aspirational and not infrequently anxious. For twenty-first century China the world encompasses the entire globe, but in the years addressed in most of these articles, the world was the West, and it didn't need to be called modern because it was presumed to be so. "China and the modern world" would express a pull, with the world characterized in terms of its modernity, that is, its economic and technological development, and a wariness lest the purity of "Chineseness" be sullied. "Modern China and the world" is a push, with the more open-ended world tending toward an auratic cultural phenomenon of mostly unargued value. Facing the world, modern China is envious, experiencing and often suffering utopian longings. The world, in this connection, is what Pheng Cheah has described as "an ongoing, dynamic process of becoming, something continually made and remade rather than a spatial-geographical entity."3 And so it appears from the articles.

Wang Ning, who invited my response to this issue, likes to foster dialogue by inviting nonsinologists to comment on the collections he has edited. That spirit is admirable, and there cannot be too much of it—on both sides. Still, we Westerners—committed or condemned to our side of the globe—why should we trouble ourselves about translations of Shakespeare or adaptations of Puccini into a language that, alas, most of us will never learn? (I've tried; it's my own much-damaged utopia.) One reason would lie in our present global imperative enjoining us generally to recognize and respect other cultures; another would be the special presence of China in today's and tomorrow's world. But, as Wang Ning also reminds us, modern is not postmodern, and "modern China and the world" looks back, not forward. Its China is mostly not today's twenty-first century megapower. Instead, these articles tell a twentieth-century story of emergence, convergence, and divergence, not of dominance. The picture of China trying to catch up with "us" that many of these articles paint can be harrowing or inspiring, or often both at once, but it is rarely pretty. Individuals figure heroically, but neither culture is much flattered. That is no one's fault. The times here are out of joint. Dyschronia is by nature wrenching. But then the question returns: what boots it to contemplate the alien agonies of an impoverished translator or a reclusive exile, or even the ambiguous successes of an abortive memoir or the tendentious adaptations of a Western classic? And how should we bring these problematic episodes from the past together with the more present-oriented accounts here of the worldwide internet or of Gary Snyder's fruitful adaptations of ancient Chinese poetry? In Snyder's case, as Robin Chen-Hsing Tsai affectionately portrays it, there is a "cultural translation" that "is not cultural theft but a debt." Even here, though, the debt is not contemporary and not collaborative but a restitution. And in other articles in this issue, restitution veers perilously close to retribution. For that reason, there remains a utopian aspiration to Snyder's kind of heterogenesis and deterritorialization. Tsai describes a relation "between East and West" (rather than between "modern China and the World") that "is not uneven or hierarchical." In practice, Snyder's grand ideal may never be realized; the balance may always be diagonal, never perfect, hopefully not a theft, but always with some element of debt. Under these imperfect circumstances, dialogue remains a challenge—and essential for that very reason.

How, then, can these articles speak to an outsider...